Living Under the Rule of the Office Occultist
I thought I was joining a standard, high-growth tech startup when I signed my offer letter. The office was in a converted warehouse with exposed brick and glass walls, the kind of place that usually buzzes with coffee machines and typing. But my onboarding experience was anything but standard. The HR manager, a woman named Sarah, turned out to be obsessed with the occult. She did not just have a few crystals on her desk for decoration. I discovered the truth when I went to the storage room to grab a stack of printer paper. Tucked behind some dusty boxes of old hardware, she had built a hidden altar. It was covered in velvet fabric, dried flowers, and small brass bowls. At first, I laughed it off as a strange personal quirk, but it quickly became the office reality. Every morning, like clockwork, Sarah walked through the open-plan office burning bundles of sage. The smell was thick, pungent, and earthy, clinging to our clothes long after she finished. She claimed she was cleansing the office of bad energy, but for the rest of us, it was just a headache-inducing start to every day. When I tried to focus on my coding, she would hover over my desk, whispering that my aura looked murky. It was invasive and professional boundaries seemed to evaporate. Things escalated when she decided that tarot cards should dictate our project assignments. I remember sitting in a meeting, watching her shuffle a deck of cards while the lead engineer waited for an update on our timeline. She flipped a card with a picture of a broken tower, frowned, and declared that I was not allowed to touch the new database migration because my current energy was too chaotic. I was the lead developer, but my professional experience was being trumped by a piece of cardstock. If you had a tough week, she did not look at your output or ask how she could help. Instead, she blamed your aura for the bugs in your code. The most frustrating part was the scheduling. Meetings were dictated by moon phases rather than client deadlines. One afternoon, we were gearing up for a major software launch that meant everything to our survival. We were ready to push the code, but Sarah stood at the front of the conference room and shook her head. She said the moon was in the wrong position and that proceeding would invite digital misfortune. We delayed the launch for three weeks because of the lunar cycle. The investors were furious, but Sarah was untouchable because the CEO thought her strange, mystical approach made the company culture unique. The situation reached a peak when she forced the entire engineering team to go out into the parking lot. She insisted that our persistent computer bugs were caused by restless earth spirits. She held a jar of tap water and began chanting prayers to fix our servers. I stood there, feeling the cold asphalt beneath my shoes, holding a shovel while she instructed me to bury a rock in the dirt. My coworkers were mortified. The lead developer, Mike, was so annoyed that he decided to play along just to end the spectacle. He stood with his eyes closed, pretending to be in a deep trance, muttering nonsense words. He told me later he was just counting the seconds until he could leave to go home and play video games. Sarah looked at him with awe and whispered to me that Mike was clearly speaking to the spirits of the hardware. It was pure theater. We eventually stopped fighting it and started faking rituals just to get her to leave us alone so we could actually work. The breaking point for me was the bonfire. Sarah claimed we needed to burn our old performance reviews to clear out our past mistakes and start the quarter with a blank slate. We stood in the parking lot at dusk, watching our hard work and history turn to gray ash in a metal trash can. I watched my annual review, which had taken me hours to prepare, crumble into nothing. It was the strangest, most surreal day of my life. I finally handed in my resignation letter when she announced that she wanted to perform a complex protection spell to shield our cloud servers from hackers. I realized that my professional career was being sacrificed at the altar of her delusions. I walked out that day and never looked back. To this day, I still see her in my nightmares, her face obscured by the gray, swirling smoke of burning herbs, waiting to tell me my aura is off.